‘In the Shadow of Empire: The Post-Imperial Urban Imaginaries of London and Paris’- Saturday May 17th 2008
‘In the Shadow of Empire’ was a one day multidisciplinary conference that brought together a wide range ofscholars working in the fields of cultural geography, film studies, French and English literatureon the subject of how Paris and London can be imagined from within a post-imperial framework.
The opening keynote speech, given by Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College London) explored the history of the cinematic representation of the Gare du Nord station in Paris, as a bifurcated, post-imperial space.While not necessarily an iconic space in the cinema, Gare du Nord figures prominently in a range of films, extending from Julien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko(1937), to contemporary comedies which often contain a trans-Atlantic romantic subplot.Vincendeau illustrated the way in which the station, split between the modern, bourgeois upstairs area, from which the Eurostar departs and the postmodern lower level, home to the RER trains destined for the banlieue, constitutes a ‘common space without common room’.
The first panel offered readings of films made in the fifties and sixties in London and Paris. Roland-Francois Lack (UniversityCollege, London) posed an intriguing relationship between figures who appear in the foreground and those who remain in the background as he charted the presence of black actors across a series of ‘Swinging London’ and French New Wave films. While he is able to find black communities in the British films, he argues that a black presence is not foregrounded in the same way in the French films made in the same historical time period. Ben Highmore (University of Essex) spoke about a few short films which were part of the ‘Free Cinema’ Movement in Britain in light of how this body of work can be viewed as a form of ‘migrant cinema’. For Highmore, the post-imperial in these films is located in its displacement and more specifically, in the absence of the iconic city as characters never actually arrive in the imperial metropolis but wander through monotonous dwelling-scapes. Highmore finds traces of the imperial in mundane and everyday cinematic spaces.
Professor David Gilbert (Royal Holloway, London) provided the ‘geographical’ counterpart to Vincendeau’s keynote speech about post-imperial cinematic spaces. Gilberttraced a multitude of inscriptions of the post-imperial, specifically manifested as traces of imperial legacies and discourses in ‘Swinging London’ concerning design plans for PiccadillyCircus, the imperialist undercurrents revolving around the construction of the Shell building and in the Orientalist images that adorned the covers of fashion magazines. What Gilbert illustrates is how the post-imperial city was still very much entangled with its imperial past, in both material and more symbolic registers.
The second panel was comprised of papers about the nature of post-imperial cinematic London, as viewed in both archival, actuality footage and in more contemporary cinema. Maurizio Cinquegrani (King’s College, London) charted the way in which the signification of certain London monuments shifts when the same spaces are examined in actuality footage and then compared with their representation in British cinema of the 80s. Paul Newland (University of Plymouth) discussed Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane(2007)in relationship to immigration, tourism and the representation of London’s East End.
The conference concluded with a final panel session, in which two respondents provided both an overview of the material presented as well as topics that were not covered during the day but that might provide other areas of study where the post-imperial may be located. Bill Schwarz (Queen Mary, London) identified the profound sense of disorder that followed the collapse of empires as a significant post-imperial moment. He also posited a notion of the ‘politics of the present’, or of unlocking histories that served the present moment, as one possible objective of the study of post-imperial phenomena. Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick) used the motif of flow in order to connect the various threads explored by conference speakers and participants. He also mentioned other spaces not touched upon in the conference itself, but that might be of interest in relation to future work on the subject, including the space of the river and of the interior.
The aim of the conference, which was to stimulate exchange among scholars from different disciplines on the subject of the post-imperial city, was fulfilled, as speakers and participants alike engaged in interesting discussions and debates throughout the course of the day. There was certainly the sense that we had only begun explore how to approach the topic of the post-imperial, as speakers explored a range of material and utilized very different methodological frameworks in their analysis.